


Here's Looking at You

by scioscribe



Category: The Holiday (2006)
Genre: Books, F/M, Friendship, Light Angst, Romance, Writers, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-17 06:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16969833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: With help from Miles, Iris starts putting together Arthur's biography.





	Here's Looking at You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovebeyondmeasure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovebeyondmeasure/gifts).



“Arthur,” Iris said casually, “has anyone ever written a biography of you?  I couldn’t find one listed anywhere, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Biography?  Sweetheart, I wrote for the movies.  The people who want to do biographies of writers are busy with guys who are a hell of a lot more prestigious than I was and the people who want to do Hollywood biographies know that nobody in or out of the business gives a damn who writes the scripts.”

Miles looked up from his piano.  “Pauline Kael said it should be the writer, not the director, who got pegged as the auteur.”

“There you go,” Iris said.  “Pauline Kael.”

“Well, I’m sure she left her share of blood on the floor, but she lost that particular battle.  You’re not seeing my face on any covers anytime soon.”  He struggled upright; Iris rose automatically to help him, but he shooed her back into her place on the sofa.  “There may come a day when I can’t pour a lady a drink, but I’m not that far gone yet.  Miles, what are you drinking?”

“Too much.”

“Want a little more?”

“You see that?” Miles said to Iris, raising his eyebrows.  “He strong-armed me into it.  Yeah, Arthur, thanks.  Whatever you’re having, I’m gonna be bold.”

“Good to see the two of you enjoying your youth,” Arthur said, making his careful way back to them with their drinks.  He handed Iris hers and said, “Why the curiosity, honey?  What’s there to know about my life I haven’t already spilled to you?”

Miles played a brief rill of “Iris’s Theme” to bolster her—a little more discreet than a thumbs up, she supposed, and actually more confidence-boosting.

“I’d been thinking of writing a book,” Iris said.

Arthur laughed.  “About me?  You could find better subject matter.”

“She really couldn’t,” Miles said, winding her theme into Arthur’s.  Iris could tell by the way he started biting his lip that he was onto a particular tune, chasing it down through a series of notes.  He shook his hands out, though, and left it.  Iris still couldn’t quite get used to that—that he would choose her.  He came over and sat down, a reassuring presence next to her, his hand against the small of her back, intimate and comfortable.  “She’s one hell of a writer, too.  The whole shebang.  Nouns, verbs… other parts of speech.”

“Adjectives,” Arthur said.

“Oh, I do the best adjectives,” Iris assured him.  She reached over and took his hand.  The more she loved him, the harder it was to keep from noticing how paper-thin his skin had become: she had to hold him lightly to keep from leaving bruises.  “Arthur, hearing you talk about Hollywood, about your life—it’s remarkable.  That you’re charming and funny and you’ve got stories to tell—that should be as much a part of your legacy as the movies you wrote.  And all you have to do is sit around telling me things while I hang on your every word.”

Arthur looked over at Miles and said, in a truly awful Brando impression, “She’s gonna make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

“God, you didn’t write that, did you?” Iris said, her hand over her heart.

“No, no, I’ll just go to my grave _wishing_ I did.”  He raised his glass.  “Oh, what the hell.”

Miles toasted.  “To Iris and Arthur.”

“And you,” Iris said, nudging him, “because I’m certainly going to conscript you into helping me with the research.”

“I look forward to it,” he said, leaning over to kiss her.

*

From _Arthur Abbot: His Life and Lines_ , by Iris Simpkins.  Introduction to second edition:

I’m told that—not infrequently by the reviewers of this very book—that it’s unseemly for a biographer to admit to being this fond of her subject, but to me Arthur Abbot was so much more than that.  Before I ever wrote a word about him, he was one of the greatest friends I ever had.  He saved me: he gave me Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell and dozens of other women who burned through celluloid like sticks of dynamite.  He gave me confidence in myself that I’d lost long ago.

I worked on this project for years—my husband, God bless him, chauffeured me around nearly all of Los Angeles and a good half of the States to collect pictures and stories.  (He did half of it even before we were married, so he knew what he was getting into.)  So much of Arthur, for me, was in his voice.  It was bound up in the stories he would tell and the advice only he could give.  More than anything else, that's what I wanted to capture.

Miles, my husband, says it’s a good thing, in the end, that I get so emotional going back through what I’ve written.  “It means you got the feel of him right,” he says.  He always knows just what to say.

And that, in the end, is the finest advice Arthur ever gave me about writing: it’s about love.  It’s about seeing other people clearly enough, and kindly enough, to know what will resonate with them.  It’s about saying what you want and then going after it, because it’s action an audience wants, not waiting or waffling.

“Shakespeare,” he said, “took a big risk with Hamlet’s indecision, and he pulled it off, but Shakespeare didn’t write for the pictures.”

We’re lucky Arthur Abbot did.

And I’m lucky, too, because that’s what put him in Los Angeles, and it was there I met him, when I needed him most.

What a corny introduction this has turned out to be.

*

Iris lived up to her word—it was only a few days after that that she roped Miles into what he kept calling her biographical safari.

“It fits,” he insisted.  “You go out, you target your prey—”

“They’re not prey!  They’re old, dear friends of his, or their children or grandchildren—”

“And you bag a couple of wild anecdotes or maybe just take some pictures.”  He lowered his sunglasses to grin at her.  “And _you_ just want someone to drive.”

“I do,” she agreed fervently.  “I absolutely do.  I still can’t get used to this traffic.”

“Well,” he said, reaching over for her hand and raising it up to his lips, “I for one am really, really glad that you’re trying.”

She couldn’t keep herself from smiling.  That was another thing she was still getting used to: not _needing_ to keep herself from it because she didn’t have to pretend to not be in love with him, she didn’t have to worry about being too much or too gushy or too demanding.  They were in the same movie, you could say, and they both agreed on what roles they were playing.

She leaned back, letting the California sun soak into her skin.  Three foul, peeling cases of sunburn she’d had already from forgetting to put sunscreen on, three, but each of them had been worth it; she felt like she should be growing in the heat like an orange tree.

“I’m glad too.  Immeasurably.”

“I guess it must have been awkward, going back to work with your ex hanging around like the Ghost of Christmas Past.  I’m assuming that everybody in England basically thinks in Dickensian comparisons all the time.”

“No, that’s ridiculous.  Very often it’s Shakespeare.”

“And here it’s movies.”

“I like movies,” Iris said.  She frowned, thinking it over.  “I think I’d take movies over Dickens, in fact.”

“That’s what makes you a Hollywood girl at heart.”  He parked.  “Okay, either we’re here and someone has a _very_ long driveway or I have gotten us completely turned around.  I’m thinking the latter.”

“No, no, Arthur said that she likes her privacy.”

“Yeah, I like my alone time too, I don’t build a Gothic castle out on the moors and, I don’t know, cover the gate up with ivy.  Where are we even supposed to turn?”

Iris consulted her notes.  “There’s a hidden entrance just past that wall.  You have to drive on the grass a bit.”

“Okay, but if some Norma Desmond comes storming out of that house and blows my head off with a sawed-off shotgun—play Ennio Morricone at my funeral.”  He made the turn going barely ten miles an hour, like he was inching forward on glass, and Iris would have laughed at it if she hadn’t also felt like they were trespassing.  Which was ridiculous.  Arthur had told Helen Boyd that they would be coming to see her.  Everything had been arranged.

“Miles, I love you, but please stop humming the _Jaws_ theme or I’m going to jump out of the car.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“And ‘Dueling Banjos’ is _not_ an improvement,” she said, deciding to head all that off at the pass.  “We don’t have anything to be nervous about at all.”

“You say that,” he said, inching the car forward, “but this whole thing has got me thinking that I need to put together a sounds of dread playlist.  ‘Tubular Bells,’ something from _Suspiria_ … she lives in a museum.  The woman lives in a museum.”

It did look like that, Iris had to admit.  She half-expected to see lines on the driveway measuring out parking spaces.

She grabbed at his sleeve.  “Miles.  There’s a _revolving door_.  She has a house with a _revolving door_.”

“Arthur did say she was eccentric.”

“He did.  Well, he said she was ‘cuckoo,’ which I took as a charming euphemism—I do wish now that I’d asked a few more follow-up questions about that.”

“You live and you learn,” Miles said, unclicking his seatbelt, “or you get murdered in what _might_ actually be the House on Haunted Hill.  You have your digital recorder thingy?  Because the police are going to need that later to play the sounds of our dying screams.”

“Right,” Iris said.  “Good thinking.  I’ll try to yell out something helpful with my last breath.”

“That’s good.  You go practical and I’ll go romantic.”  He smiled.  “I could work myself up to quite a few proclamations of love, you know.”

There was something about the way he said it—some artificial glibness—that made Iris move her touch from his sleeve to his hand.  She laced their fingers together.

She said, “I didn’t come back to LA to avoid running into my… _schmuck_ of an ex-boyfriend.  I came back for you.”

“And Arthur,” Miles said.  He kissed her lightly and then smiled against her mouth.  “Otherwise my feelings are going to have to be hurt on his behalf.”

“And to give Amanda and Graham and the kids a free place to stay when they come back to the States,” she murmured, kissing him again.  “Because obviously they couldn’t afford a hotel…”

“Obviously,” he agreed.  His fingers closed in her hair, creating a hot tingle up and down her scalp that reverberated all the way down to her toes.  “Marketing geniuses and fancy book editors would be starving in the streets if it weren’t for us.”

“Yes, I’m very, very unselfish that way, always thinking of others—your lips are so soft.”

“Mm, it’s a little secret called chapstick, and I’ve gotta tell you, a lot of guys, they’re too self-conscious to use it, but I say you have to keep the equipment in good working order.”

“You are in _very_ good working order,” Iris said, gasping a little as he got the first few buttons of her blouse undone and she felt his fingers on her bare skin.  “Although—ah—I have to point out, really against my own inclinations at this point, that—God, yes—we might not want to have sex in an old woman’s driveway.”

He pulled back just a little.

“Damn.”

“I agree.”

“On the other hand, she does have, like, three acres of drive, so we could maybe… no, you’re right.  You’re right.”  He shook out his hands like he’d just played some terrifying bit of Rachmaninoff and looked over at her, his smile a little crooked like she’d kissed it askew.

*

From _Arthur Abbot: His Life and Lines_ , by Iris Simpkins:

His specialty was romance.  Katharine Hepburn once said that no other man could make her heart beat so fast just from reading a script.  Across nearly all his scripts, he played the changes on love.  His couples could be funny or heartbreaking.  They could settle into affectionate marriages or burn out like Tristan and Isolde.  He put meet-cutes on submarines and in the Library of Congress.  No matter what, the pull between his leads was always convincing—and always loaded with as much sexual tension as the Hays Code would allow.

Arthur Abbot’s own romance didn’t begin until his twenty-second birthday, when he first met Marion Ingleby.

She would become every woman he ever wrote.

*

Helen Boyd was, bar none, the scariest woman Iris had ever seen in her life.  She would almost suspect that the Gothic house had materialized _around_ Helen just to suit her.  Helen was vampire-pale and had unnervingly straight, long silver hair; she wore a black opera gown.  Iris became suddenly aware that she had a spot of ink on her blouse and some hair falling out of her bun.

Helen’s voice, however, was as bright and sugary as bubblegum.  “Oh, good, darlings, you made it in.  You’re Arthur’s biographer, yes?  Iris?  And you’re the boyfriend.  Miles Something.”

“Nailed it,” Miles said.

“Follow me, we can talk on the veranda.”  She clicked off in her black satin heels.  “I was starting to think I’d have to send one of the crew out to hose the two of you down—the whole drive has security cameras, dearests.  But I see prudence won out in the end.  Do either of you want a Bellini?”

At the moment Iris wanted several.  She accepted.  Helen called for the drinks, and even though there didn’t seem to be anyone in earshot, Iris wasn’t surprised when they materialized on a proffered tray a minute later.  Of course they did.

“Now,” Helen said, arranging herself and the meters of fabric that made up her gown in one of the wrought-iron chairs, “Arthur said you were looking for material about Marion.”

“Yes, but before we get to that, can I just ask—”

“Why I look like Elvira?”

She wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she understood the general thrust of it.  “Yes.”

“In a good way,” Miles hastened to add.

“Thank you, darling.  It’s because I have a bit part in some absurd little vampire movie and I’m letting them use the house—well, you can certainly see why.  Obviously I’m a vampire.  Brrar.”  She bared her teeth at them.  “It’s all terribly camp, but I’m afraid I’m enjoying it.  And work keeps you sharp.  What did you want to know about Marion, dear?”

“Do you mind if I record this?”

Helen waved her hand graciously.  “I love to be recorded, it’s my entire purpose in life.”

Iris wondered if there was any chance she could Helen’s biography after she finished up with Arthur’s.  She could have sat on this veranda drinking Bellinis and listening and made a good life’s work out of it.

“Arthur said that you were Marion’s best friend—that you brought her to his birthday party.”

“That I did.  He was… oh, what was he then?  A script supervisor, I think, and I was acting already.  Nothing either of you would have seen, nothing anyone would _want_ to see, which was why I was buttering up Arthur.  I knew he wanted to write and he could string a sentence together and make the words click like beads on a string, he’d done additional dialogue already.  Uncredited, of course.  And he was always a gentleman—no, more than that, he was always a man who liked women, who could be friends with them.  I thought he might write me a part in something.  So I threw him a birthday party.  I figured what the hell, at the worst I’ll have splashed on champagne and some cake for a pal, if he doesn’t wind up behind a script, then he doesn’t.”  She took a sip of her drink and smiled with irreproachable self-satisfaction.  “You can bet he wrote me parts after I introduced him to Marion.”

This would all be terrific for the book—not just the romance angle but Arthur’s history with his colleagues and how entangled he was in actresses’ aspirations for great roles—and Iris wanted to hug the interview to her chest and jump up and down.  She refrained.  She was a professional.  She was wearing, to her great regret, impractical shoes.  She celebrated by grinning into her Bellini.

“And how did you and Marion know each other?”

“We’d waited tables together when we first came to Hollywood.  I liked her—I loved her.  She felt like she’d never existed before she walked into that little diner, she was so fresh, so unspoiled by life, like she’d never heard of disappointment.  And the things she wanted—she didn’t want them as a means to an end or because everyone else wanted them or because they were the best way to use her beauty.  She was the only girl I knew who didn’t want to act at all.  She wanted to design costumes: she could talk about sequins until her eyes crossed and I’d be riveted by it.  I couldn’t put two stitches together in a row, but the way Marion loved it all made me love it, too.  She just cared so damn much.”

“She sounds pretty spectacular,” Miles said quietly.

Helen had put her glass down and turned her head; her long eyelashes had darkened with tears.  “Give me a moment, will you, darlings?  I don’t want to go through makeup again, I hate sitting still.”

“Of course,” Iris said.

Helen looked off over her impossibly long backyard—there seemed to be no end to it, though from the way she stared, it was like it wrapped around in time rather than in space.  She shrugged.  “They didn’t have a meet-cute, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

“It’s one thing I wanted to ask, yes, because he likes them so much.”

“He does.  But if life were always like the movies, we wouldn’t need them so much.  No, they just met, and it was very ordinary.  She wished him a happy birthday.  He fetched her a piece of cake.  They talked.  And then at some point I looked over and I saw that he had fallen in love with her.”

“How did you know?”

“Darling, it was written all over his face.  He didn’t have long to pine, of course, because she fell head-over-heels for him about an hour later, and _that_ I know because she cornered me in the powder room and told me so.  You’d have thought she’d gotten hired to do costuming for _Marie Antoinette_ , that’s how happy she was.  They made a very dear, very lovely, very uncinematic couple.”

“Sometimes you don’t want cinematic,” Iris said, thinking of the epic unhappiness of Jasper, the tears and illicit sex and betrayals, alongside the fun, delicious joy of Miles, the movie nights and the mix CDs of movie themes and the pinochle nights with Arthur.  She looked over at him.  The late afternoon sunlight glinted off his watch and glittered on the fine hairs on the back of his hand.  And all at once, in a way she could not have scripted, could not have satisfyingly proved to an audience, she felt more in love with him than she ever had before.

And that, she thought, was saying something.

*

From _The Guardian:_

This comprehensive biography of writer Arthur Abbot, a major Hollywood screenwriter whose films were as successful as his own escape from the limelight, achieves an unlikely and inspiring feat.  New writer Iris Simpkins, freshly transplanted from Surrey to Hollywood, sees the glitz and glamor with appealingly fresh eyes.  Her charm, coupled with Abbot’s own storied life, put the magic back into the movies.  And there’s not a trace of CGI to be seen…

From the _New York Times Book Review_ :

Simpkins is, of course, likable; the biography as a whole is likable.  It is all, in fact, so likable and sweet-natured that it has no substance and instead collapses in on itself like cotton candy.  Simpkins’s heartfelt hagiography leaves one with the suspicion that she was too close to Abbot to dig into his life but, but her earnest thoroughness confirms that the matter is, in fact, worse, in that there is simply not enough of Abbot’s life to dig into.  The material can be compressed into a sentence—a decent man wrote some fine films.  Simpkins’s love for her subject leaves her unable to see that she has, in the end, given him too many pages…

From the _New York Times Book Review,_ “Times Critics Discuss the Year in Books, From Triumphs to Disappointments”:

My tastes and David’s never match up, so I adored _Arthur Abbot: His Life and Lines_ , Iris Simpkins’s hybrid bio-memoir of screenwriter Abbot and her own warm, involved relationship with him.  (For those unaware: Simpkins and her now-husband film composer Miles Dumont named their young son after Abbot.)  I can see why purists might recoil from this work that is, in the end, neither fish nor fowl, but I found Simpkins’s exploration of life and meaning to be both generous and insightful.

From Amazon.com, user review:

This item arrived on time but the dust jacket was torn.  ONE STAR!!

*

The night closed with the three of them around the dinner table.  Miles had made spaghetti—“There are exactly three things I can cook,” he had told Iris, “and one of them is pasta, but I’m really good at jumbling up what I put _in_ the pasta or what kind of _shape_ of pasta it is, so bam, that’s like a dozen extra meals right there”—and Arthur had brought over a bottle of wine.

Iris had had possibly a glass or two too much on top of the afternoon’s Bellinis, and she felt warm and unwound and pleasantly floaty.  She could see the shape of the book in her head now—the way both the ordinary rhythms of life and the patterned rhythms of Hollywood had shaped Arthur over the years and made him the man she was so glad to know.  It was such a new thing to work on something so long, with no deadline to force her.  She’d get to learn about herself and she felt, lately, like she was someone well-worth getting to know.

“Helen always was a character,” Arthur was saying.

“Yeah, I think she was having just a little bit of fun with us for part of the time,” Miles said, “kind of playing a role, but she really cares about you, we could tell.”

Iris said, “And she just melted when she talked about Marion.”

“You had to,” Arthur said.  “You just had to.  Nobody else was like her.”

“From what Helen told us, I have to agree.”

“She did a lot of the—what do you call it—interior design of this house, you know,” Arthur said, looking up at the ceiling.  “That’s one more reason I could never move out after she died, I didn’t want to be away from all those memories.  But I don’t want the two of you to feel like you can’t redecorate, don’t get me wrong.  People should have their own houses, tear up carpeting, knock down a wall—you do whatever you need to when it’s yours.”

He had said things like this more often lately, and Iris sometimes wondered if it was her fault—if she had, by talking about his legacy, by taking up the task of writing down his story, made him think about what it meant for his life to be coming to an end.

“Arthur, when you talk about your will, or whatever arrangements you want to have, is it because I’m writing the book?  Because summarizing your life makes you feel like it’s over?”

“Iris, sweetheart,” Arthur said, “being ninety-two makes me feel like my life is over.  I talk about this stuff now because having you two in my life makes it worth it again to think about what happens after I’m gone.  I’m fine with saying this because you said you like corny.”

“I do.”  She patted beneath her eyes.  “I love it, really.”

Miles put his arm around her shoulders.  His lips brushed her cheek.  “I’m taking that as a tip from Arthur,” he said against her ear.  “Amp up the corniness factor.  Done.  The man knows romance.”

When they at last parted from Arthur for the evening—“Don’t make me cry again,” Miles said to Arthur, pointing at him before he went in for a hug—they walked hand-in-hand to the car.

Miles said, “I thought you were going to show him the picture.”

“I meant to!  I did, but time just slipped away from me.  And now it seems rather morbid.”

Helen had given it to her for the book, an old shot of Arthur taken at the party where he had met Marion.  Arthur—so young then, younger than Iris was now—was holding a plate with some cake on it and he’d clearly forgotten it, he was so wrapped up in his talk with Marion.  He was smiling.  And what Helen had said was true: that he’d fallen in love radiated out of him.  In black-and-white, he was incandescent with it, his face like a candle flame.

She didn’t know if she would want to see it, if it were her, if she couldn’t look that way at Miles anymore.  She wasn’t sure.  But it was no use keeping secrets—she _would_ show it to him.  She knew she ought to.  But in the meantime she took it out and they looked at it in the soft dome-light of Miles’s car and then looked at each other, knowing for sure the look on their faces.  Two candles burning in the dark.

*

From _Arthur Abbot: His Life and Lines_ , by Iris Simpkins.  Dedication:

Here’s looking at you, kid.

 


End file.
